Songs to shoot yourself by

Liz Jones

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2093248/LIZ-JONES-Lovely-young-women-men-pink-cheeks-Katie-Price--me.html

reckons women only study at Oxbridge to meet a better class of husband.  This is despite referring to herself as a 'feminist' - without any sense of irony or shame, as I really don't think she possesses either.

Nor much of an intellect, come to that, because she has also recently stated that at the proud and venerable age of 53, there is nothing she would like better than to be swept off her feet by none other than Mr Darcy.

What the HELL is this woman on?

Caitlin Moran's supremely pragmatic test for this elusive condition seems to have totally passed her by.  All you need to do is look down your knickers, then answer the following two questions:

1.)  Do you have a vagina?

2.)  Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you answer yes to both, congratulations, you're a feminist.  You perfectly fit Rebecca West's definition of the term as a woman who expresses views that differentiate her from the average doormat.

She utterly fails to notice the somewhat vital point that women have been studying at Oxbridge and many other venerable institutes of learning since the 19th century in order to get an education.  With one of those to your credit, there's nothing you need less than a happy ending with Mr Darcy and a ridiculous collapsed meringue of a dress.

The reason she hasn't picked up on this fundamental fact about women's lives today is vanity.  If we are to believe the picture of her created by her extensive body of work, basically, she is so obsessed by herself and her pathetic excuse for a 'life' that she considers nothing outside herself and her own petty concerns to be of any importance whatsoever - including history, facts and the opinions of other women.

This self-obsession run riot probably explains why her writing is so poor.  It appears it simply has not occured to her to read her own work back and think a bit about how it might be coming across to other people.

So why haven't the editorial team at the Daily Mail taken her aside and had a quiet word of friendly advice whenever it seems called for?

Maybe they think their readers out there in Middle England really DO believe women are as flaky, sad and all-round bloody useless as depicted in Liz's columns - in which case we need feminism more than ever.  Or they really don't give a monkey's butthole how many people she manages to infuriate +/depress beyond endurance with every new installment of her columns, just so long as it shifts loads of papers and gets plenty of hits on their website.  Or perhaps they actually have tried to say something at some point, possibly more than once, only she just wouldn't damn well listen.

Not that we should let the Guardian off the hook, either.  After all, they are the outfit that published that truly dire column about her total disaster-wedding some years back.  This, if I remember rightly, was during the era when the editorial team were obsessed with features penned by people dying of cancer.  That's right, they decided the wedding of the century made the perfect follow-up to harrowing accounts of terminal illnesses faced with great courage and dignity by highly talented journalists.

Every sodding week, she would go drivelling on and on about how her husband didn't like her, fancy her or respect her.  The feeling was obviously mutual, as she spent much of the rest of the time detailing what a lying, faithless git she reckoned he was.

Every week I would hurl the paper against the wall and yell:  "Then why the **** did you marry him, you stupid *****?"

Things reached such a pass that I was seriously considering writing to the Guardian to complain.  I eventually decided against this course of action because I was worried they would reply: "Why don't you sod off and read the Daily Mail, you raving nutter?".

The end of the world is nigh – latest news just in!

And there isn’t as much time left as we thought.

The reason I know this is because I was sitting with my dad during the festive period that has just departed, watching one of those Brian Cox In’t Universe Bloody Great? documentaries on BBC 4.

Professor Dreamboat chucked on his parka and trendy hobnailed boots to go climbing up a ginormous glacier out in the middle of the Gobi desert (or wherever it was – travel instructions were sadly not included), whilst discussing the end of the world as predicted by the world’s top scientists.

Okay, now admittedly we’d heard it all before.  Round about five billion years from today, our nice bright dependable sort of sun is going to run out of fuel for nuclear reactions.  This will force it to expand – and keep on expanding, until it becomes so large that it gets described as a ‘red giant’.  The earth, meanwhile, has either been frazzled to a crisp in the rapidly rising temperatures of the expansion phase, or been swallowed up by the freakishly swollen sun.  Or possibly both.  No-one is quite sure, though they all agree the planet will be pretty well buggered by that point.

Professor Swoonbucket, on the other hand, said all this would happen ONE billion years in the future.  He did!  I heard him.

So I’m sitting there, spurting out fountains of sherry over the cat’s cushion, shrieking: “WTF?  WTF?  Run for the hills!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

My dad takes another swig of the amontillado, puts his glass back down by the sofa and observes: “There’s fuck-all you can do about it, so stop making such a racket.”

“But don’t you find it all slightly depressing?”

“Why are you so worried about it?  It’s not going to bother you.  You’ll be long dead by then.”

“What about the people who are living on the planet when it happens?”

“That’s their problem.”

Onscreen, the tousled-haired guru of lurve grins fit to bust, like it’s the greatest development to benefit humanity since sliced bread (fits better in a toaster, I’ll give it that).   

Why either of them think the prospect should be remotely cheering is completely beyond me.  You’re talking to the woman who was specially perched up on her grandad’s shoulders to take a good, long look at comet Kouhoutek in the frosty far-away autumn skies of 1973, because it wouldn’t be coming back to the earth for another 75, 000 years.

If that knowledge seemed unbearably poignant to a six-year-old girl, why would I have changed my attitude so substantially between then and now?  What would prompt such a philosophical U-turn – finding out the world’s best scientists got their sums wrong?

Even though I realized it would be impossible, I still wanted to be there when Kouhoutek returned.  The earth it visited would be inconceivably different to the world of 1973.  That frightened me, to be honest.  Yet I remained curious.

And now I can’t help wondering what the end of the world is really going to be like, when it finally happens.  Yes, it’s incredibly sad, yes, I KNOW it’s not my bloody problem – but I STILL wish I could hitch a ride with Dr Who in the Tardis so I can see it for myself, whether or not anybody plays Toxic by Britney Spears as a soundtrack over the top of it.

Incidentally, in their recent study Never In A Million Years: A History Of Hopeless Predictions, Ivor Baddiel (any relation of David?) and Jonny Zucker point out that the above dire prediction might not even happen when it comes to the crunch.  Back in 2007, boffins at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy discovered that a planet quite like Earth had somehow managed to survive when its sun went into its red giant phase.  They hypothesized that V391 Pegasi b had been pushed into a new orbit twice as far away from its sun as the previous one.

Baddiel and Zucker then go on to speculate that any intelligent lifeforms on the planet would have celebrated their good fortune long into the night, ‘which, with their new position in the galaxy, now lasts twice as long’.

Er, I believe you’ll find it’s their year that now lasts twice as long.  That’s the period it takes their planet to make one entire orbit round their sun.  The day is the amount of time it takes their planet to whirl right round once on its own axis.

Scientists, derrrr …